Portrait of Greta Moll

In 1908 Matisse was not yet the famous name he became. He had just opened a small art school in Paris, and one of his first students was Greta Moll, a young German sculptor who, with her painter husband, had thrown in with the new movement people were starting to call Fauvism, the wild beasts. She agreed to sit for him. Moll later remembered giving him some ten three-hour sittings, and that after a Sunday studying the Venetians in the Louvre, Matisse came back and reworked her arms to make them fuller and more solid. You can see that decision in the finished portrait, the broad pink arms and the firm dark outline holding the whole figure in place. She was 24 and would keep painting into her nineties.